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My Entries in Valley Brewers Pro-Am

This post is slightly delayed, and I’m sorry for leaving y’all with no local beer news to read. I’ve got more updates coming, but wanted to start on a personal tone.

As mentioned earlier, Valley Brewers is throwing a homebrew competition in conjunction with Figueroa Mountain’s “Figtoberfest” on October 5 in Buellton. The deadline to enter beers is fast approaching, and I will be driving north to Solvang sometime this week to drop off a pair of my beers.

This is my first time entering in anything like an officially sanctioned competition. I did compete in one contest in Boston with Fatuous Lassitude, a delightfully fruity Strawberry Hefeweizen, but that was much more of an amateur affair. The judges at this competition have allegedly* been trained in the BJCP guidelines.

Without further ado, I’d like to share my recipes for my brewing friends here. The first is an American IPA which I’ve dubbed Southern Gold because it uses mainly Goldings in the boil and has a nice addition of New Zealand hops in the dry hopping stage. The second is Burton Fog, or my take on an English Pale/ESB. The Fog name is both a play on “London Fog” as well as the fact that the brew is bittered with American Northern Brewer hops, which are the defining hop of Anchor Steam. The American IPA is dry, and bursting with hop aroma, and the English Pale has a strong bready/toasty backbone with a hint of floral hops and banana. There’s perhaps a bit more fruit than I’d like in that one, but it’s still a fine beer. I do believe that Southern Gold could be a contender – of course, I haven’t tasted any competitors so I really don’t know.

*I can’t really judge the judges here. I have been told they are BJCP certified, and I trust that. However, I put the “allegedly” in there because I don’t really trust beer judges to be objective. I think it’s impossible for them to be objective, in fact, unless perhaps the competition takes place under perfect laboratory conditions, which it won’t. So this isn’t really a knock on the judges, just a dig on the nature of judging.